Former conman who worked for an international romance fraud ring talks about the group's recruitment methods and fraud tactics
This type of fraud, known in Chinese as
Posing as 'Alicia,' This Man Scammed Hundreds Online. He Was Also a Victim.
https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/cyberscams-human-trafficking-forced-labor-ba2c6c1a
Guracha Belachew Bersha, aka Billy, a former 'pig-killing conman' who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, is a 41-year-old IT engineer from Ethiopia.
Billy was held captive in a crime-ridden area of Myanmar and forced to run a pig-killing scam for 16 months, posing as a wealthy Singaporean woman named Alicia, to lure men, mostly from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, into investing in fake investments.
Billy, who was freed from the pig-killing con men after his family raised a $7,000 ransom, says the looks on the faces of the victims whose lives were ruined are what has traumatised him more than the physical torture he endured.
For example, one Pakistani man who was Billy's victim had a wife and four children, but he was so infatuated with Alicia, played by Billy, that he wrote her long love poems and sent them to her. However, when Billy was no longer interested in him and stopped replying, the man sent him a video of himself pouring acid on his face.
Billy recalled that he would never forget it until the day he died.
Born into a poor family and the second of seven children, Billy studied computer science in the Ethiopian city of Hawassa and earned a master's degree in automation engineering from a university in Chengdu, China.
Fluent in English and Mandarin in addition to his native Amharic, Billy stayed on in Chengdu to work after graduation, when he was offered a job at a fintech company called Huilong Network.
The documents from Huilong Network that Billy was deceived by.
Billy, who had no doubts at the time, had a virtual interview with a man who spoke Chinese and English, signed a contract to work for seven months at a monthly salary of $1,500 (approximately 230,000 yen), and traveled to Bangkok, Thailand. After receiving a generous daily allowance and spending about two days in a luxury hotel, Billy was picked up by a driver and headed to Mae Sot, a town on the border between Thailand and Myanmar, with three other victims.
After an eight-hour journey, the driver checked them into a guesthouse and the staff collected their passports. Then, at midnight, when the driver announced that it was time, Billy realized something was wrong. On the way, Billy noticed on his cell phone that he was crossing the border, but by that point, it was too late to turn back.
Shortly thereafter, Billy arrives at
On the first day, Billy refused to work, but the next day, the guards beat him so hard he couldn't stand, so he was forced to commit fraud. However, he was unable to get any results, and after being sold to Laos, he was sent to a facility called Mountain View in Asia New City, Shwe Kok Ko , Myanmar.
A building in KK Park.
The boss there, like the other two places, was Chinese, and there were 100 people working there, including the management and con men like Billy. Billy recalls that half of them were Chinese, a third were Ethiopian, and the rest were Ugandan.
Once at the facility, Billy was instructed to memorize Alicia's fake profile and a detailed manual of her scam methods, trained to lead conversations, and given a mobile phone with WhatsApp and Telegram and a laptop with photos of Alicia and forced to deceive his victims.
Billy has scammed people from the wealthy to the poor, including a goat farmer in rural Pakistan who believed Alicia would make him rich after investing $280 in fake investments, only to end up with a small house and a herd of goats.
Billy was freed from the pig-killing scam thanks to his family raising $7,000, and was deported to Ethiopia, but he says he can't go back to his parents' home because he can't face his father, who sold the factory. He is also having difficulty finding a job because he can't talk about what he did during the more than one year gap.
The Wall Street Journal points out that, behind the scenes, the fraudsters were also victims, in a crime syndicate in which fraudsters who had been deceived by the Chinese mafia were gathered in one place and committed large-scale international fraud.
Billy, who still has scars from the torture and trauma of having deceived so many victims, told The Wall Street Journal, 'I'm still not in a positive frame of mind and I need time to heal, so I'm thinking about going camping for a month or two, maybe even three months.'
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